Bentley V8 S

What Happens When A Six-Figure Bentley Goes Way Off-Road? We Found Out.

In order to provide its range of luxury barges with a more fuel-efficient option, last year Bentley Motors unveiled a V8-powered version of its landmark Continental GT. This year, the Crewe team ups the ante with the performance variant V8 S Coupé and Convertible, stunning $200K Grand Tourers that can spiral towards $275K if you let your indulgences soar. We were invited to test drive the V8 S on a drive from San Diego to Palm Springs to Orange County and back, in order to fully understand the Bentley Experience — both on the road and off.

Some of the best adventures start in the strangest ways. We had just been driving out of Palm Springs and heading towards Dana Point — the tony Orange County beach community best known for the Ritz-Carlton sprawled across its beachside bluffs — when we hit a snag. Or rather, a full-on bramble wall: gridlock. Not one of those rolling-around-at-5-mph traffic jams, mind you: This was the kind of molasses gridlock where you see a truck planted on the side of the road with a giant sign warning of an upcoming accident. Only now, the overflow of stopped traffic had already stacked past the truck and its blinking sign, rendering the message moot. That's when the GPS woke out of its stupor and told us to look south. “Take the service road to your left,” the detached voice suggested through the speakers. Normally I pay attention to my GPS, but ours had been woefully troubled since we’d left the Viceroy Hotel about an hour earlier. Its blue line of direction on the 8-inch display shooting from left to right, circling up behind us and aiming off screen to no place in particular. My driving partner Che and I had already dismissed its suggestions as the drunken ramblings of a barstool prophet, so we were both shocked when we looked left and actually saw a small road ducking up behind a hill.

“Could it possibly be talking about that road?” Che asked dubiously, noticing the ‘No Trespassing’ sign, unlocked gate and crumbling asphalt. “It looks like something out of Dukes of Hazzard.”

I pulled off to the shoulder to have a better look, and our heads ping-ponged from left to right, heavily contemplating the suggested “service road” versus the colon blockage we were currently mired in. “OK, let’s see what satnav can tell us,” I said swiping on the crisp touchscreen display, noticing this small road indeed did cut across a wide swath of earth, delivering us onto another highway some 12 miles away.

“Well, you win some, you lose some,” said Che, citing an aphorism that would become the mantra of our three-day adventure. So we aimed the nose of the glimmering Kingfisher blue Bentley V8 S towards the service road, and when there was a break in oncoming traffic we sped across, making good use of the V8 S’s 502 pound-feet of torque to roar into the suspect byway. Not one minute into our detour, a nagging doubt crept in as the road quickly devolved from potholed asphalt to what could generously be called graded dirt. Surely, this was not what the fine English gentlemen at Bentley Motors had in mind when they plotted our journey of opulence, meant to impart in us what they referred to esoterically as the "Bentley Experience." Only a couple hours prior, I had been face down at the Viceroy’s Estrella Spa, the scent of lavender and mint oils hanging in the air as a young masseuse worked out my kinks to a soundtrack of Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto. Last night, perfectly grilled steaks smothered in Argentinian chimichurri were served poolside along with bottles of pinot noir from Paso Robles. The night before that, I slumbered in a casita larger than my house at the five-star, 45-acre Rancho Valencia resort outside San Diego. The bed was made from the dreams of a thousand unicorns.

So taking their AWD GT convertible through some glorified cow path certainly was about as far from the “Bentley Experience” as one could possibly imagine — and Bentley execs could possibly fear. Only, it was probably the best thing that could’ve happened.